Mary Brydon-Miller’s research while affiliated with University of Louisville and other places

The university is struggling to keep up with the demands of a fast-changing world, and, as a system, higher education generally does not respond quickly to change. Its institutions produce valuable knowledge about social issues and problems, but this is so often not followed by action constructively using that knowledge to effectively address these problems. Shaping the Future of Higher Education generates knowledge to enable researchers, teachers and leadership in higher education to learn how to positively embrace constant change through innovative, collaborative, systemic, critical and creative thinking and action. Through a participatory and transformative paradigm, it strives to create knowledge to enable everyone involved in higher education to move from talking about change to actioning it. The book presents possible structures and processes for learning, teaching, research, community engagement and leadership. It provides pathways to shape a higher education system that is inclusive and student-centred, that promotes knowledge democracy, and is responsive to and relevant for dealing with pressing social issues as they arise. The contributing authors of this book are internationally renowned researchers with years of experience in their respective roles in higher education. Their ideas will benefit all who are involved in, concerned about, and/or actively promote most effective higher education practices.

The unique affordances of Action Research, including flexibility, playfulness, accessibility, and a focus on practical problem solving provided crucial strategies for generating knowledge and developing solutions to the challenges created by the Covid-19 pandemic. The move to online research settings, in particular, required action researchers to find ways to adapt existing research methods and to devise new approaches. This article describes the work of a group of doctoral students in an Educational Leadership program and their instructor in carrying out action research methods in both synchronous and asynchronous online settings. If the months of the pandemic have taught us nothing else, it is that flexibility and willingness to innovate, which are central to action research, are valuable assets in times of uncertainty. The unique affordances of Action Research include creativity, playfulness, accessibility to multiple participants and audiences, transferability of findings, and a focus on the generation of knowledge designed to be pragmatic and problem-focused. These qualities can be harnessed to address the multiple challenges we have encountered during the pandemic including health equity and access, poverty and unemployment, and the interruption of education for vulnerable student populations. They also offer us hope that action research can continue to contribute to addressing the challenges we are sure to face in the future. As students in an educational leadership doctoral program, we focus on examining problems of practice in our schools and districts through action research. As we adapted to online learning in our own schools, we were able to bring these skills to bear in our doctoral studies by developing strategies for conducting these action research methods in both synchronous and asynchronous online settings. This paper describes some of the approaches we developed in the hope that this will enable other action researchers to implement these methods in their own schools, organizations, and communities. The specific action research methods described in this paper are Future Creating Workshops, Citizens’ Juries, World Café, Nominal Group Technique, and Digital Storytelling.

The Gloucestershire Gateway Trust (GGT) is a social enterprise initiative in Southwest England focused on Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD). This article describes a six-year action research collaboration that has sought to support the GGT and its local non-profit organizational partners using a variety of action research methods, including community surveys, Group Level Assessment, Future Creating Workshops, and arts-based methods. The development of a community resident research team (CCRT) model has been a core aspect of this partnership that honours local knowledge and experience while providing training and employment opportunities to local residents. This initiative and the action research partnership described here offer an innovative approach for using AR to support effective community development that could be replicated in a variety of other contexts.

This article describes our use of an online Future Creating Workshop (FCW) as a planning strategy to support our Global Climate Change Education Initiative (GCCEI). The GCCEI is an Educational Action Research project designed to provide the opportunity for students to discover how climate change acts to affect weather, health, economy, politics, and culture in their own communities and around the world by bringing young people aged eleven to fourteen into the conversation and into relationships with an international group of peers, In order to move this project forward despite the challenges created by the pandemic, we initiated an online FCW, grounded in Critical Utopian Action Research. We provide a detailed description of this research process highlighting both the challenges we face in trying to launch this project as well as our visions for the future. We consider the implications of this research process in relation to problem-based and multimodal forms of learning. This article describes the virtual FCW that we hope can serve as a model to others as well as a reflection on the implications of the outcomes of this research process for researchers and educators interested in fostering meaningful dialogue among students regarding the climate crisis.

Community-based research offers opportunities to address issues of sustainability and inclusion through participatory democratic processes. But at the same time, these approaches to research raise ethical challenges not found in more traditional forms of inquiry. Here we review seven areas in which community-based research can generate specific ethical concerns. These involve issues related to collaboration and power, blurred boundaries between researcher and researched, community rights and conflict, ownership and dissemination of research findings, questions around anonymity and privacy, working within the constraints of institutional ethical review processes and the challenges of engaging in social action for social change. Using these overarching issues as a framework, we consider brief case studies that explore an ethical issue or challenge in doing community-based research with vulnerable populations. In analysing these case studies, we focus on examining how the university and community groups partnered, the processes they used to set up and conduct research, the challenges they faced, successes and failures they experienced and lessons from this experience related to the ethics associated with developing and maintaining community-based research partnerships. Based on these case studies, we also explore the larger ethical issues involved in doing community-based research, with examples from the South African context.